A Conversation with Nic Sebastian

By Lindsey Lewis Smithson

Nic Sebastian is the author of the collections Forever Will End on Thursday and baobab girl. She is the creator of Whale Sound, a website dedicated to recording and publishing contemporary poetry, along with the accompanying blog, Very Like a Whale. To further her work with audio poetry Nic has formed a companion site to Whale Sound, Voice Alpha, where thoughts, theories, and suggestions related to the art and science of reading poetry aloud for an audience can be found. She has also worked to develop the nanopress publication model, having formed The Lordly Dish Nanopress.

 

Your collection, Forever Will End on Thursday, was edited by Jill Alexander Essbaum. What was it like for you, working with an editor on this collection? Can you talk about the process, as a writer, that you experienced having someone new dig into your writing?

There are detailed process notes at the nanopress site, but briefly: It was fabulous! Jill is a terrific editor and I learned a lot from her - both about what it feels like to be an edited author and about how (as an editor) to handle an author - that has really helped me in my own work as an editor for Whale Sound Audio Chapbooks. I think the key thing for an editor to convince an author of early on is that they (the editor) 'get' the work and want it to be more itself, to be the best itself it can be. You don't want your author thinking that you are trying to get them to write the kind of poems that you would write. At the same time, all authors have their blind spots and all have little areas of laziness, places that got a lick and a promise, or that are wearing a band-aid, and need more. Jill was terrific on all these levels. She knew to let the poems be themselves but asked penetrating questions and poked her editor's fingers at all the weak spots in the fabric of the collection, testing it and testing me. There were many fixes early on that were easy to make. As the book got tighter and tighter, I was pushing back more, and that would tell Jill that this was a matter of thought-through poetics that I would defend, and not some laziness or a band-aid. And she would respect that. I feel the same dynamic with the authors I edit for the audio chapbooks – you quickly begin to know where you should push and where/when you should back off. I also learned a huge amount through Jill's editing about how I write. I asked myself questions as a result of her questions, I noticed certain tics I had, certain modes of repetition, certain ways of thinking, of feeling, even. I definitely changed as a writer as a result, and I think for the better.

This collection has been run by Lordly Dish Nanopress, who and what, really, is the Lordly Dish Nanopress? You talk about how this press works on the website, buthow did you develop this model for publishing? What have been the most surprising aspects of this process for you, and what if any, are the real draw backs?

Lordly Dish Nanopress is a purpose-formed, single-publication poetry press established by Jill and Nic. In the foreword to Forever Will End On Thursday I explain its genesis, and Jill comments too, in her note from the editor. The nanopress published Forever Will End On Thursday and has done its work. Other poets and editors using the nanopress model will have to name their own nanopress. We called it Lordly Dish Nanopress because we discovered very early on in our partnership that we shared an interest in the Bible story of Jael (she was really bad-ass!) in Judges 5, she who "brought forth butter in a lordly dish" to Sisera. I describe the nanopress concept at the link above – it is the one-time result of a poet and an editor coming together. The gravitas of the press results from their combined gravitas (in our case, of course, Jill brought exponentially more gravitas to the equation than I did!) and it isn't transferable.

For those of us who are just completing our MFAs, or will be in the near future, how do you see presses like The Lordly Dish coming into play, both in terms of students who want to publish and students who want to edit?

Probably it will be the students who want to publish that will have the most to gain. It really is aimed at poets who have a good chunk of work already published in reputable magazines and are looking to get their first collection out without going through the long, expensive and uncertain lottery of poetry contests. Part of the deal is that you do want someone 'established' to edit your collection. That definition will vary, of course, but the editor should bring a level of gravitas to the project, or else the quality control mechanism won't work. It's a big commitment to edit a full collection, and no one will undertake it lightly. But if couched, as it should be, as a volunteer service to poetry, one that will help get more good poetry out in front of readers, I think we will find that poet-editors will step up to do it on a one-time basis. The nanopress model expects that the poets who get this editing support will in their turn step up to provide the same generosity to another poet later on. There is an extraordinary amount of generosity with time, expertise and creative energy in the poetry community. Jill has been a major pioneer editor and major model - so generous, patient, careful, thoughtful and just plain brilliant! I get a lump in my throat just thinking about it, frankly. Poetry, in my view, is inherently non-profit (and should be so), and so must rely on generosity to survive and grow. The community knows this. Because of my experience with Jill, I do Whale Sound Audio Chapbooks, which is all volunteer time and energy editing and publishing, and a way of giving back what I got from Jill.

You also have an audio chapbook out, baobab girl, from Whale Sound.

Well, baobab girl is actually my guinea-pig publisher's chapbook. I had been writing 'tree' poems for a while and finally had enough to put together a small chapbook of tree poems. I was beginning to look around for somewhere to submit it for publication, when I discovered a pressing need for it elsewhere.... When I started Whale Sound Audio Chapbooks I wanted to offer as many publication formats as possible and I needed a basic text to experiment with from the start. Since 'audio chapbook' was not a common concept, I needed a concrete example of an audio chapbook website to show people before they submitted. Baobab girl was the right size for the project – to what better use could I put it? After we mastered the website format, we decided to offer print chapbooks and again, I needed a chapbook to experiment with on the Lulu website for that. Similarly with the CD format, and similarly, with the e-book format on Smashwords. Right now, I am experimenting with coding my own ePub and MOBI files for e-readers and poor baobab girl is once again the lab rat for that experiment. (I am convinced, by the way, that offering poetry collections & chapbooks in multiple formats, some of which are free, is definitely the way poetry publishing needs to go!)

In baobab girl various trees appear as reoccurring images, were these poems all written with the intention to be in a collection together, or are trees something that have always intrigued you?

Yes, it was written as a collection of tree poems. I'm a huge tree fan. There is nothing in the natural world that moves me like trees do – and the bigger and the older they are, the better. There is some sort of primal connection between us and trees, I think, that is different in quality from the connection we have to other natural features.

Forever Will End on Thursday, like baobob girl, has many images that reincarnate themselves throughout. Trees appear often, as do words like "oboe," which is one of my favorites. The poems have a worldly quality to them, mentioning various counties and cultures. What inspired this collection and how, if you can say, were these poems created; was there a bigger picture imagined while writing or was this a poem-by-poem process?

This collection was very much a poem-by-poem process. The first poem I ever had published - way back in 2006 - is in there! I was never writing with any particular goal in mind, but there are unifying themes. Travel is definitely one. I do tend to travel quite a bit, although I have not necessarily visited all the places I write about – some of them are 'mind travel' poems. I enjoy writing these, imbuing myself with images and sounds and impressions of a place - mainly through the internet- and then crafting a poem with whatever I want to say, using the place as a medium. 'Place' is an important concept to me. Trees and oboes frequently appear. So do bones and mist, for whatever reason. Getting a first collection out is important for many reasons, but I think, most of all, it allows a poet to move on in their work. To 'wrap up' certain themes and obsessions and techniques, and go on to the next thing, avoid becoming stale.

In addition to both your own writing and your work on the nanopress idea, you also focus a lot of energy on poetry as a spoken art form. What initially got you interested in poetry as a spoken art in addition to a written one?

That story is written here. I call Amy King my poetry fairy godmother, because she started me on the audio path, which has now branched out in so many directions.

At Whale Sound you read both submitted and solicited work, correct? How do you determine what qualities make a poem good to read aloud versus simply good on the page?

Correct. Whale Sound also takes third-party submissions, where one web-active poet submits work by another. Early on I would accept poems for reading without reading them aloud and sometimes paid for it once I actually began to read the poem aloud. As I wrote in this blog post for the Best American Poetry blog, voice is an organ of investigation. Voice is relentless. It prods and pokes and unerringly finds weak spots. The text can't hide from voice the way it can from eyes and from the intellect. Now I always read a poem aloud carefully before accepting it for Whale Sound.

On Whale Sound you talk frequently about web active poets, why is being, or becoming, a web active writer important? Well, first of all Whale Sound itself is such a Web 2.0 project – it could not exist without the Internet. And then, I have found, there are two kinds of Internet poets – one kind that takes from and gives back to the online poetry community (which I call 'web-active); and one kind that only takes (not web-active!). I try to focus on the former kind, because Whale Sound relies on all of the poets published there to keep spreading the word about each other's poems at the site. Individual promotion is collective promotion. I like to try and make sure that every poet will carry some of the collective promotion weight, and to avoid poets who just want to be carried by the online energy of others.

At its core Whale Sound is a place to hear, and share, audio poetry. What sparked your interest in audio poetry?

As I said above, it was really Amy King's responses to 10 Questions for Poetry and Technology that got me started. But once I had started, I began to understand that reading poetry aloud is a learning tool in itself, and one that has no substitute. I have absorbed so much about poetry and poetics just from carefully and respectfully reading other people's poems (or OPP) aloud on a regular basis. I'm a big fan of reading OPP aloud for an audience – I think you learn from it in a way you never do from reading your own poetry aloud for an audience.

Aside from Whale Sound, and your own blog, Very Like a Whale, you also work on Voice Alpha, which provides resources for poets on how to read aloud. How long did it take you to really learn how to read poetry aloud well and what advice do you have for poets who do not regularly perform their poetry?

I'm always learning and never feel 100% satisfied with a reading. I think of my voice as an instrument and am always studying it. I'm at the point now where I feel I know pretty much its whole bag of tricks, if you like, and am beginning to wonder how to shake it all up somehow. My reading is generally more understated than not, and I would not be comfortable moving into the field of high drama (or even of drama!), but I am beginning to think about acquiring some new voice 'tricks.' My advice for poets who do not regularly perform their poetry is to find opportunities to read other people's poems for an audience. It's a very different experience and a much more intense and varied learning experience to get inside the skin of someone else's poems and voice them carefully and respectfully.

 

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